Greasepaint Dynasty

Four generations of character actors and stars, dysfunction and tragedy.

Scott Eyman

Oct. 12, 2012 3:14 p.m. ET

Donald Spoto's career as a biographer resembles no one's so much as that of the recently deceased Charles Higham. Each man wrote an early, serious work that received justified attention—with Mr. Spoto the subject was Hitchcock, with Higham it was Orson Welles. Each man followed it with a series of gossipy bios that threw in the occasional lunatic assertion—Errol Flynn was a Nazi (Higham), Laurence Olivier and Danny Kaye were lovers (Mr. Spoto)—leaving the impression that sensationalism was a more powerful lure than the pedantry of excessive research.

So one approaches "The Redgraves: A Family Epic" with some foreboding, as there is enough dysfunction and tragedy within that acting clan to populate the collected works of Eugene O'Neill. Michael Redgrave, the paterfamilias, was himself the son of an itinerant and largely unsuccessful actor who drank himself to death. Michael would be a more accomplished artist though just as heavy a drinker. His rocky marriage to actress Rachel Kempson would produce two extremely talented character actors, Lynn and Corin Redgrave, and one star—Vanessa.

The Redgraves

There was something blithe but bland about most of Michael Redgrave's early work in film. He was graceful in Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes" (1938) but seemed uncomfortable as a light leading man in the Cary Grant mold. Redgrave was one of those actors whose good looks concealed a character actor screaming for release. He achieved remarkable results as the fidgety, terrified ventriloquist who loses control of his dummy in "Dead of Night" (1945) and his stifled anguish in "The Browning Version" (1951) is, like Marlon Brando's performance in "A Streetcar Named Desire," the definitive interpretation of the part, reflexively mentioned whenever anybody else plays it. These roles, as well as his buzzing vaudeville turn in Orson Welles's "Mr. Arkadin" (1955) released his energy in a way that confirms the great reputation he earned on the London stage, where he gave legendary performances in everything from "Macbeth" (1947) to Clifford Odets's "The Country Girl" (1952).

Michael Redgrave's best film roles were men wrestling with public or private failure, and they constitute what Mr. Spoto calls "a rogue's gallery of neurotics": people doomed to unfulfilled lives, which Redgrave could relate to all to easily because of what he delicately characterized as "difficulties in his nature." That was his way of referring to his predominantly homosexual impulses. After Redgrave wed Kempson in 1935, he indulged in a long series of furtive gay relationships. There was a single lurch to an older woman, the distinguished actress Edith Evans, but whether straight or gay, all of Redgrave's extramarital flings resulted only in an increase of guilt. After a suitable period of adjustment, Kempson responded by taking long-term male lovers.

Between his profession, his private life and a drinking problem, Michael Redgrave had a lot on his mind, which accounts for his indifferent performance in the highly demanding role of a father. Referring to his father's work in Robert Ardrey's "Thunder Rock" (1942), Corin Redgrave, his son, called it a "veiled performance—very dark, very brooding, very hollow-cheeked, rather remote and inaccessible. That was the father that for long periods of time I knew."

Redgrave's performances would be increasingly damaged by his drinking. In 1962, When he played Claudius to Peter O'Toole's Hamlet, Laurence Olivier confronted him with a typical lack of tact: "When you came on as Macbeth, dear boy, it was as if you were saying to the audience, 'F--- you—I am Macbeth.' Now, as Claudius, you are just dim. Why don't you shine?" Mr. Spoto quotes the playwright Robert Bolt saying that Redgrave "went off the tracks because of the drives in him that he just could not seem to control. . . . He was the most tortured man I ever knew. But when he was good at his work, he was brilliant."

Corin Redgrave (1939-2010) spent most of his youth and middle years engaging in various forms of left-wing advocacy but only emerged as a serious actor after his father's death in 1985. Anybody who saw him on stage in plays by Harold Pinter would have to put him on the same level as his father but with a burlier, more malevolent presence. Lynn Redgrave (1943-2010) carved out a tidy career as a sort of modern-day Elsa Lanchester, specializing in dotty English eccentrics and had a late-life renaissance with "Shakespeare for My Father" (1993), a one-woman play.

As for the eldest child, Vanessa was a star on stage by her early 20s and an incandescent flame in early films like "Isadora" (1968). Now 75, she has never had her career derailed by her tedious allegiance to fringe politics or by occasionally misguided acting choices, such as the Chico Marx accent that burdened an otherwise luminous portrayal in Peter Hall's 1989 revival of Tennessee Williams's "Orpheus Descending." Vanessa absorbed some of her parents' conflicts: Her first husband, the director Tony Richardson, was a bisexual who eventually died of AIDS. The dynasty was sailing into a fourth generation with the acting careers of their daughters, Natasha and Joely Richardson, until Natasha died in a skiing accident in 2009. Joely Richardson's career continues to thrive.

Despite many opportunities for both sensationalism and sentimentality, "The Redgraves" is briskly narrated and sympathetic but lacking that moist quality that can creep into his writing. Still, he enlivens his 100-year tale of shifting professional, familial and sexual allegiances with just enough theatrical gossip to keep things lively, as when Noel Coward passed a marquee advertising Dirk Bogarde and Michael Redgrave in "The Sea Shall Not Have Them." "I don't see why not," Coward said. "Everyone else has."

—Mr. Eyman is the author of "Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille."

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